by Lee H. Butler, Jr., Ph.D. Professor of Theology and Psychology, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Black Faith and Life at Chicago Theological Seminary, and President, Society for the Study of Black Religion
I am deeply affected by the attitudes that have recently been expressed against the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. and the Trinity United Church of Christ. Instead of seeking understanding, there has been a blatant disregard for the simple rules of conversation. Developing a story against a person and a people, and then asking a person and people to speak in defense against that closed-ended story does not advance understanding. The controversy that bears the pejorative language of “hate,” “racist,” and “anti-American” is not a simple and isolated indictment of one man and one congregation. This controversy disparages the African American preaching tradition and the African American Church heritage.
When David Letterman and Bill Maher “splice and dice” video footage which typecasts President George W. Bush, people don’t condemn the President and scream impeachment on the grounds of those portrayals. Furthermore, we don’t charge and judge the American people with incompetency for living beneath the administration of a President who has been typecast and caricatured as incompetent. And yet, from a single, isolated sound bite, African American theology and the African American prophetic preaching tradition have been judged and condemned.
For as much as I am dismayed by judgments based upon sound bites, I am aware of the “American way” of using sound bites to define a person’s life. A few sound bites that come to mind are: “Give me liberty or give me death;” “I cannot tell a lie;” “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country;” “My fellow Americans;” “I have a dream today;” “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Even as most know the personages who spoke each of those phrases, we recognize that those important moments-frozen in time and impressed upon the American consciousness-do not sum up the lives of the speakers. We do not allow phrases to totally define a person’s whole life story. In most instances, we respond to these phrases because they represent our self understanding as a nation. Just as some phrases support our self understanding, there are also phrases that challenge our image.
Consequently, I am deeply disturbed by the way thirty seconds of sound bite have come to represent 36 years of ministry at the church known as Trinity United Church of Christ. The absurdities of this reductionism can be viewed in one of the earliest media reports that prompted the first firestorm. A news journal interviewer identified the church as “Trinity Unity Church” and “Trinity United” during the same interview/report, and further suggested the church to be a separatist cult. Trinity United Church of Christ is neither a part of the Unity Church nor is it a nondenominational or separatist community of believers that stands outside the Christian heritage as a cult might. There was not enough integrity in the early reporting to respectfully identify the church as the Trinity United Church of Christ, a member congregation of a predominantly white denomination, that is, the United Church of Christ (UCC) that has its national offices in Cleveland, OH. This same disregard for respectful detailing continues to mark the controversy that grips and disenfranchises so many today.
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by Tom Montgomery-Fate (MA ‘95)
It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of towns…
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Spring is here. How do I know? The coyotes are moving. They have mated and are searching for dens. I saw a pair in a subdivision in West Chicago last weekend and one jackknifed out of some waist-high weeds along the prairie path today while I was running.
The presence of coyotes in the suburbs and city has become a popular topic in recent years, with more people—or, quite unfortunately, their dogs—coming into contact with the animals. This has stirred both excitement and fear.
Urban coyotes excite us. Why? Because they don’t belong here. Because a coyote sparks a nostalgia for the wild, for the natural world we’ve conquered and nearly destroyed. They spark the memory of ourselves as animals.
But urban coyotes also prompt fear. Why? Because they don’t belong here. Because no one wants their miniature dachsund eaten as a midnight snack, or to be sitting in a lawn chair some evening and turn to see a “wild” animal steal a porkchop off a gas grill. The coyote reminds us: we are not wild, not animals, but human.
I grew up in Iowa—fishing and hunting on my friends’ farms––but in all those years I only saw four coyotes, and always from a distance. The first coyote I ever saw up close was in Glen Ellyn, the suburb where I now live. On a morning walk the crash of a garbage can lid drew my eyes to a neighbor’s driveway, where a thin, mangy dog was chewing on a wedge of pizza crust. He ran. I later figured out it wasn’t a dog, that coyotes and their families were moving to the burbs. And it wasn’t for the schools.
Recent studies show that urban and suburban coyotes do better than their country cousins. There’s more to eat and good places to hide. Rural coyotes have a 30% chance of making it through their first year; urban coyotes have a 60 % chance. In rural areas the leading cause of coyote death is hunting or trapping; for urban coyotes it’s cars. Thus, suburban towns with slow traffic speeds and large parks or forest preserves—like Glen Ellyn—are a more likely place to see coyotes than in the country.
But they’ve been popping up everywhere.
A suburban high school English teacher was walking through the Lincolnwood Mall parking lot back to her minivan, when she noticed a thin animal slinking between the rows of cars and slowly coming toward her. Suddenly, the coyote lunged for her 4 year-old miniature poodle, clamping his jaws around the dog’s hindquarters. The teacher grabbed the head and there, in the mall parking lot, she and the coyote had a tug of war.
Lured by the smell of sizzling meat, a coyote wove through a half mile of bumper to bumper traffic and harried shoppers and soapbox preachers to reach the propped open door of a Quiznos on Adams Street in downtown Chicago. The docile thirty pound canine walked past the counter without ordering and lay down on a stack of Diet Pepsi in an open cooler and stayed there.
Two jets had to abort their landings at O’Hare Airport until some coyotes could be cleared from the landing strip. Airport workers frequently see them trotting near the O’Hare runways. In the last fifteen years 23 coyotes have been hit by airplanes in Illinois. Cars and roadkill I understand. But airplanes? “Runway” kill?
The point is that beyond the excitement and fear that the coyote provokes is a simple truth: its arrival into our “territory” is less an intrusion than a natural migration. Their “reverse commute” from the disappearing “country” to the suburbs and city is largely in response to Chicago’s wild sprawl.
Like goldenrod and starlings and people, coyotes adapt well to changing and disturbed environments. They have learned to flourish in the niches of habitat that dot Chicago’s chaotic geometry of roads and towns and subdivisions. But as these green pockets and corridors shrink; as they continue to be divided and subdivided by new highways and Wal-Marts, our tolerance of these brash new neighbors may wane. At these points of frustration it may serve us well to remember that their behavior has evolved in response to ours. And that as the boundaries between country, suburb, and city have blurred, so has the definition of the “wild” and “the natural.”
Tom Montgomery-Fate is a professor of English at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn and the author of Steady and Trembling: Art, Faith, and Family in an Uncertain World.
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On May 1st, Chicago Theological Seminary will be hosting the annual Canstaneda Lecture. This lecture, affiliated with the LGBTQ Religious Studies Center, will feature Dr. Bo Myung Seo, Associate Professor of Theology and Cultural Criticism at CTS. The lecture will be be at 6:00pm in Graham Taylor Hall, with a reception beforehand at 5:00pm in the Cloisters.
For more information, please see here.
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For 10 years, Chicago Theological Seminary has been blessed to have Susan B. Thistlethwaite as our president. When she announced her desire to return to teaching, we responded with delight in adding such an outstanding educator to our classrooms but also, in truth, with some trepidation. Filling her place as the steady hand at the helm of our institution would be no small undertaking.
In spring 2007, CTS organized a 15-member Presidential Search Committee composed of trustees, faculty, students and friends of the seminary. The committee was charged to leave no stone unturned in searching for the next great leader of this vitally important ministry. Boardwalk Consulting, a search firm experienced in filling leadership positions for religious ministries, helped us prepare a profile by which to measure candidates and guide our search.
Together, we contacted more than 200 individuals for leads and advice, identified more than a dozen qualified candidates and interviewed five finalists. As the search narrowed, the entire CTS faculty and senior staff were given an opportunity to meet with a leading candidate, who also was introduced to students and the wider CTS community. After almost a year of meeting every other week, prayerful discernment led the search committee to recommend unanimously that the board of trustees elect Dr. Alice Hunt the 12th president of CTS.
On April 11, 2008, the CTS board of trustees acted on that recommendation. Dr. Hunt will assume the duties of president on August 1; her formal installation will follow in the fall. A celebration of Dr. Thistlethwaite and her term of leadership with take place Friday, May 2.
Once more, CTS enters a time of great promise with the guidance of a vital and caring leader. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Hunt to our campus and welcoming a new era as we continue our distinctive role in educating transformative leaders of faith.
For more information on the appointment of Dr. Alice Hunt, please go here.
To learn more about Dr. Hunt, go here.
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This coming Tuesday (April 15th), Chicago Theological Seminary will be hosting its inaugural Schaalman Lecture. This lecture, affiliated with the Rabbi Herman Schaalman Chair in Jewish Studies, will feature Dr. Paula Fredriksen, Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University. The lecture will be be at 6:00pm in Graham Taylor Hall, with a reception beforehand at 5:00pm in the Cloisters.
For more information, please see here.
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By Vanessa Lovelace (Ph.D. Student at CTS and adjunct professor at Elmhurst College)
Ever since Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president of the United States, some of his detractors have chosen to go after him by attacking his religious beliefs. On the one side are those who claim that Obama is really a “Muslim plant.” On the other side are those that decry the faith and values espoused by his church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois. The premise is that his church preaches racial separation and hatred; therefore Obama is guilty of advocating racial separation and hatred by association. Moreover, they call for Obama to denounce Trinity Church as proof that he does not support what they claim is the church’s racist views.
Although both claims are false, as a presidential candidate for good or for bad, Obama himself is fair game for dirty politics: Obama is; his church is not. As a matter of full-disclosure, I attend Trinity Church. Nevertheless, I believe that under no circumstances should a candidate’s place of worship be open to attack. I do not know whether The Church at Rock Creek that Mike Huckabee attends in Little Rock, Arkansas, or North Phoenix Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona where John McCain attends, both of which congregations are affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, teach that Hillary Clinton has stepped out of her place as a woman running for president; or if the Mormon ward in Belmont, Massachusetts attended by Mitt Romney teaches that Obama’s race makes his candidacy anathema. What is important is what the candidates say that they believe, not what their respective places of worship allegedly teach or their pastors preach. Attendance at a church, synagogue, mosque, other or nothing at all is a private matter and does not belong in the public debate over whether or not a candidate is fit for the office of president.
If attack one must, then keep them focused on the candidates. However assaults hurled at a candidates’ place of worship, such as the ones against Trinity Church by individuals such as MSNBC’ s Tucker Carlson, Illinois Review editor Fran Eaton, Fox’s Sean Hannity, Slate.com’s Christopher Hitchens, The View co-hosts, The Wall Street Journal and Good Morning America are not only repugnant to the journalistic standards these entities claim to uphold, but reveal more about the character of the ones doing the disparaging than the object of their contempt. It is time to call a ceasefire on attacks on candidates’ places of worship.
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Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.
That’s Matthew 7:17-18
This passage shows that the controversy over Barack Obama’s membership in Jeremiah Wright’s church relies on backward thinking.
Backward thinking.
Thinking backward.
Nobody can come up with anything that Obama has done that they can use to defame him. Over 20 years in public service he has consistently done good work with integrity. No bad fruit.
So Obama-critics abandon Jesus’ standard of assessment. They hunt around in this exceptional leader’s background in search of something in his past that they can use to smear his good name - maybe then he can be made to look like a phony.
Slander the tree, because you don’t want the fruit to be good.
It was perhaps inevitable that some disingenuous so-called “journalists” would discover and latch on to Jeremiah Wright, a spiritual mentor and prophetic religious leader with whom Obama has a great deal of history. Wright says certain inflamatory things, which are easy to extract as sound-bytes from his lifelong of messages of love, hope, empowerment and healing. Through an endless loop of tiny offensive (when taken out of context) video clips, the 24-hour news cycle makes him out to be a bad tree. And a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Obama must be no good.
Now, Susan Thistlethwaite points out (see below) that this misrepresentation of Wright’s gospel message is grotesquely deceptive, and - let’s not mince words - contemptible, but beyond that crucial point, Jesus says:
It’s backward thinking.
You judge the tree by the fruit, not the fruit by the tree.
Instead of saying that the offensively one-dimensional media-peddled caricature of Wright is a testimony to the character of Obama…
We should see Obama’s character and accomplishments as a testimony to the work and witness of Wright.
By your fruit you shall be known.
Obama is the fruit of Wright’s tree.
In 36 years as senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, Wright grew the congregation from under 100 to over 8,000. This growth happened because the church does monumental good in the lives of people in its community. Trinity has dozens upon dozens of extensive, effective, life-giving ministries to people in all walks of life: seniors, college students, welfare moms, people living with HIV/AIDS. They have scholarship programs and counseling services. They nurture Ph.D.s and they help ex-cons abandon crime.
Check out Trinity’s ministries: http://www.tucc.org/ministries.htm
In addition to all these things, Jeremiah Wright and Trinity UCC embraced and empowered Barack Obama. Obama and countless others are the fruit of this tree.
Brothers and sisters, the tree is good.
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By President Susan B. Thistlethwaite
I don’t know about you, but I have just about had it with people who think that thirty seconds is adequate to understand what a sermon is about. Steve Chapman’s column on the commentary page of the Chicago Tribune yesterday is just typical. “Wright [Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright] apparently sees this nation as defective and divided beyond repair.” Really? Not based on the full-text of the sermons of Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, examples of which are appended below. This is what passes for journalism today—you can see a thirty-second clip on YouTube and you’re good to go as a journalist. No research necessary beyond that.
Well, I don’t need to tell you all about the standards for the media these days, but I do need to tell you, in no uncertain terms, that thirty seconds does not get it done for interpreting a sermon, interpreting the bible, interpreting where we as human beings stand in the light of God’s revelation in this time or in any time.
The first sermon in the links below is by Rev. Dr. Wright and it is the one that has generated the most controversy. It may surprise you to learn, especially if you have only been listening to the geniuses in the media, that this sermon is all about God. “Governments change,” says Rev. Wright, “but God does not change.” Rev. Wright is quoting Malachi 3:6 in the King James Version, “I am the LORD and I do not change.” Governments change, sometimes for better, Rev. Wright argues, and sometimes for the worse. Whether his examples of better and worse are examples with which you agree or examples that make your blood boil, the theological point is the same. God does not change. Governments change. And when they change for the worse, both in Malachi’s view and that of Rev. Wright’s interpretation of the text, there is judgment on those who, as he and the prophet Malachi note, would make themselves God in the place of God.
The judgment of God on the nations is a big theme in the prophets. The biblical prophet Jeremiah gets thrown in jail by the King for preaching such cheery messages as “Hear the word of the LORD, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, Behold I am bringing such evil upon this place that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.’” Rulers hate prophets who preach like that. They much prefer the prophets who “prophesy falsely.” “[M]y people love to have it so, but what will you do when the end comes?” And what will YOU do if you only have thirty second YouTube clips to rely upon for interpreting the bible?
More and more, people seem to want the thirty second theology. Most Americans today, both those who would espouse a “biblical literalism” and those who consider themselves more liberal, are, as Steven Prothero has demonstrated in his wonderful book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know-and Doesn’t, virtually ignorant of what most of the bible actually says.
Increasingly, Americans are shopping for churches where they never have to hear a word from the pulpit with which they might disagree. As the recently released current Pew study demonstrates, in faith as well as in other aspects of life, Americans love to shop. People are moving away from the faiths and communions of their birth and shopping around to find one they agree with.
At the end of the day, this migration toward the message that will not challenge us right down to our very souls is a migration away from the Otherness of God. You don’t need to agree with Karl Barth that God is “wholly other” to humans, to recognize that it is the word that you do not expect, the word that shakes you up, even the word with which you may continue to disagree, where you are most likely to encounter the God who is transcendent.
The shopping trip Americans are on to find a church where they always agree with the message is ultimately a flight from faith; it is certainly a flight from the biblical message, not only of the prophets and their language of judgment on the nations, but even from the words of Jesus. “You brood of vipers!” “You hypocrites!” thunders Jesus. It’s not all the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospels.
I make it a point to listen to a lot of preachers. I listen to Rick Warren, I listen to T.D. Jakes, I listen to John Buchanan and I listen to Jeremiah Wright among many others. This takes a lot longer than thirty seconds and I believe my faith is the stronger for it.
What about you? Are you on a shopping trip in the Great American Mall of Faith, or are you a person of faith seeking greater understanding of the wonderous I AM? “Who do you say that I am?”
You can see Rev. Wright’s sermons through the links below:
Tell the Whole Story FOX! Barack Obama’s pastor Wright
FOX Lies!! Irresponsible Media! Barack Obama Pastor Wright
Obama Pastor Wright on God’s unwavering love
Obama Pastor Wright Speaks on Real Power
Wright, Obama Pastor Speaks Truth to Power
Barack Obama Pastor Wright on Men and Worship
Obama Wright on the truth about women in the Bible
Obama’s pastor believes in God and America. Men and Worship
There are even more here.
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By President Susan B. Thistlethwaite
Geraldine Ferraro, former vice-presidential candidate in the 1980’s and a prominent fund-raiser for the Hillary Clinton campaign, last week told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif.: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”
I think of all the ways this comment is offensive and I’m having a hard time choosing between “staggering ignorance of U.S. history and current culture” and the insightful Catholic theological category for human sin, “willful ignorance.” I lean toward the sin concept, because I believe this is a sinful statement on a number of key levels. But I’m not going to ignore historical and cultural ignorance either, as I believe it is the way forward for the country beyond the Ferraros and their monovision.
The New York Times has reported the Justice Department statistic that “an estimated 12 percent of African-American men ages 20-34 are in jail or prison…The proportion of young black men who are incarcerated has been rising in recent years, and this is the highest rate every measured.” Just for comparison, note that 1.6 percent of white men in the same age group are incarcerated.
So, let’s see, to follow Ms.Ferraro’s logic, the other 88% of African American men are being promoted to high public office? Facts dictate otherwise. There are more African American men now in prison than in college and the employment rate for African American men has dropped to just over 50%. It’s nigh on to impossible to get a job in this economy anyway, let alone when you have a prison record. Incarceration rates, unemployment and poverty are linked.
The reason I believe this statement by Ms. Ferraro is an example of the sin of “willful ignorance” is that a person would have to will themselves to actively exclude evidence fully available in every paper, blog, and 24 hour newscycle to come to the conclusion that it’s a “lucky” break for Senator Obama that he was not born a white man.
But how does white America take responsibility for the “willful ignorance” of a Geraldine Ferraro? Indeed, how do I take responsibility?
We need a Museum of Slavery. We stubbornly refuse to look at the real history of this country, the conditions of slavery itself and its aftermath that is still being played out in the statistics I quote above on incarceration, joblessness as well as many others. This is not, of course, the only history we are steadfastly ignoring in a national case of “willful ignorance,” but there it is. Lots of work to do.
I was in Berlin recently and I went to see the acre-wide memorial to the Holocaust and also the new Holocaust museum. The two photos that are with this blog post show the central, I guess you would call it sculpture, that leads you through this huge group of columns that are just “off”. They lean slightly, tilt gradually and finally totally you’re your perspective. The other picture is of a group of metal faces with screaming faces that were placed on the floor in the new “museum”. You enter, there are no signs but the people behind you are pushing so you start to walk across the room and the plates shift under your feet and they make screaming noises. It’s terrible. So then you think, ‘do I go back? Do I go forward? How far is it to get out of here?’ It teaches complicity in great evil in a way I’ve never seen.
These were creations designed to have the German people themselves confront what got skewed in their thinking and have them come to terms with their own complicity in genocide. They did this. The Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust. They took responsibility. Is it enough? No, of course not. But it’s better than “willful ignorance”.
We will continue to have attitudes like that of Geraldine Ferraro and others unless and until white America builds a Museum of Slavery and Its Consequences and educates itself and its children about what I believe is the original sin of this country that lies festering at the heart of our espoused core value of freedom.
And here’s one more thing, Ms. Ferraro. You didn’t win when you ran for vice-president. You. Just because you didn’t win doesn’t mean other women can’t and don’t achieve. I’m not saying there is no such thing as sexism, because of course there is, but you need to take some responsibility for why you lost and why a lot of why you lost was your own responsibility. And then you need to think far more deeply about all the forms of oppression still operating in this country. Here’s a big hint: there’s more than one.
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by Tom Montgomery-Fate (MA ‘95)
Since I had spent most of my previous life reading novels and essays and poems instead of theology I was lost when I enrolled at Chicago Theological Seminary many years ago in Hyde Park on Chicago’s southside. So early on I turned to that thick, heavy book that I sometimes think is divinely inspired. Yes, you guessed it: The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology.
As a naïve twenty-something seminarian I wanted to understand the “religious passion” that I saw in my peers and teachers, and in tons of people that weren’t in seminary. So one dark night in my little cubby in Hyde Park I opened the good book and looked up the origins of both words.
Passion means “to suffer.” Ouch. This religious stuff is going to be painful. I wondered about those people on TV who said to “follow your passion” to Aruba or to the Mercedes dealership. I have a passion for shopping, for desserts, for cheese, for horses, for paperweights, for pinball, for jazz, and…. Enroll online in Passion University: “Holistic education for passionate living.” Find love at passion.com: “sexy personals for passionate singles.”
Hmmm… Where does the suffering fit in? Here passion would seem to mean quenching one’s most pressing urges and desires. It is about getting what you want and feeling good.
Then I looked up the origin of the word religion: “to bind together again.” This made more sense to me. A religion, then, I presumed, could both unite and enslave a community, both liberate and indoctrinate, depending on how one read history and tradition and doctrine, on how one was religious, on what kind of passion one drew on.
During the years I was muddling through seminary in Hyde Park, a newly graduated Harvard law student returned to a nearby poor community where he had worked for several years as an organizer. Imagine––1992––the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review graduates, passes over a myriad of lucrative corporate opportunities and returns to Chicago to work in a community of have-nots, directing a voter education and registration drive. I imagine him striding from door to door with a clipboard, directing a bevy of young volunteers. Why did he do this? What could he have been thinking?
My point: When people wonder how or why Senator Obama “emerged” into the phenomenon he has become, they should consider the moral depth of his life experience. His years organizing on the south side, teaching law at the University of Chicago, practicing law for the marginalized, working as a state senator and then a U.S. Senator. All this work models a rare kind of “religious passion”–the difficult but essential struggle to restore community.
Why do the masses throng to hear Senator Obama? I have seen him speak many times in person and on TV, and the audiences seem not just excited, but relieved that his passion is not shallow, that it is in fact com-passion, that they are not being dismissed, but instead called into the work of democracy. One gets the feeling that the people in his audiences are less interested in one-time tax rebates than in returning what they have to give to America.
I may be drunk with idealism, but I’m starting to believe the Obama wave is not only the product of micro polls and focus groups and money. Unlike most politicians I have observed in my life, when this fierce yet gentle prophet from the southside reaches out, the masses reach back. And it is not just a longing to be close to a rock star, or to touch his coattails. My best hope is that it is a genuine longing to make a difference, to get involved, to tie together again the frayed strands of a country, to recover a story that we can tell together.
Tom Montgomery-Fate is an English professor and the author of Steady and Trembling: Art, Faith, and Family in an Uncertain World.
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April 30, 2008 By Development
